George Soros: ‘Brexit hurts both sides – my money was used to educate the British public’
The philanthropist who has spent billions promoting democracy talks populism, Trump and powerful enemies
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...hurts-both-sides-money-educate-british-public
It is now rare for a week to go by without a populist politician painting Soros as a ruthless Bond villain with nefarious plans to reshape the planet. Last year, Trump suggested that Soros might be paying illegal migrants to come to the US; in Turkey, President Erdoğan has called him “
a man who assigns people to divide nations and shatter them”; in Italy, Matteo Salvini has claimed Soros wants the country “to become a giant refugee camp because he likes slaves”. Last month, Soros’s financial support for the anti-Brexit Best for Britain group led Jacob Rees-Mogg to call him the “Remoaner-in-chief” in parliament. Nigel Farage has called him “
the biggest danger to the entire western world”.
As a reporter based in eastern Europe, I have had a ringside seat to the political hostility Soros has faced over the years. I spent a decade in Russia, where
Vladimir Putin blamed him for organising revolutions in neighbouring countries; in 2015, his philanthropic foundations were
banned from the country as a “threat to state security”. Last year I moved to Budapest, the city of Soros’s birth, where the far-right Hungarian prime minister,
Viktor Orbán, had taken Soros-baiting to a new level, erecting thousands of billboards featuring a cackling Soros, warning Hungarians not to let him “have the last laugh”.
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What sustains him, I ask, particularly given the recent intensity of the attacks he has faced? “It challenges me and therefore it energises me,” he says with a smile, in his still-strong Hungarian accent. “When I look at the list of people, or movements, or countries who are attacking me, it makes me feel I must be doing something right. I’m proud of the enemies I have.”